8 comments:

Some neighbors decided to buy some ewes, raise a few lambs and make a couple of bucks. Seemed like a good idea until it was time to separate the lambs from their mothers. The lambs screamed and the ewes screamed back, that lasted all night until the truck came to haul the lambs off. The ewes continued to scream and cry for a couple of days afterwards. The sounds they made were heart rending. I couldn't eat lamb for several years after. Reminded me of the time a calf died in a field near here. The cow stood over the body, rigid with grief, and didn't move for days.

The longest I ever lasted as a vegetarian was about a year. By the end of the year I was dreaming about meat. I thought about it like I thought about sex when I was sixteen. Finally a vegetarian friend told me that I should probably go ahead and eat some meat. By that time I probably could have clubbed a baby seal and eaten it's heart.

These days I eat dead things frequently. I try and remember the animal on the plate but mostly I don't bother.

Twenty some years ago, I spent a few years around big corporate agriculture. I saw all of those factory farms that the animal rights assholes like to talk about. They were pretty bad. Being an animal on one of those farms was about as bad as being a human and working at most human jobs. That's the part that animal rights people miss.

It can actually be a hard question, all the bullshit of the animal rightists aside. The only amnimals that I have ever killed on a farm with a knife are pigs and goats. I gotta say that I damn near sliced their heads off with one cut because I was afraid of their suffering. Unless God is giving you extra help (ie if you're Jewish or Muslim) you just can't kill a cow humanely with a knife. I understand that the Kosher kills are not the prettiest things either. The only slaughter plants that I have seen the inside of are poultry plants, and it ain't pretty. Though I eat beef routinely I rarely eat chicken, but it is for other reasons ie doing necropsies on dead and rotting birds. I don't like the moral high horse that the ideological vegetarians are on, but I am almost convinced that anyone who wants to eat meat should be required to either do an occasional kill themselves on the farm or to actually see the inside of a slaughter plant if they are chicken (no pun intended). I'd suggest a tour in say Grade 9 or 10. All that being water under the bridge I loved your reply Beer. Well said. There is still the overwhelming Canadian question in the air. Did Harper REALLY eat seal organs in his little northern trip ? Some think it was faked. If nothing else the "dip" that was pictured put his one piece (if that) considerably below the level of guts of Mikielle Jeane who apparently reached into the corpse to pick the best pieces out for herself. Ah what those Canadian politicos won't do for a photo-op.

I was on a prison bus headed for CIM The California Institute for Men. Along Interstate, 5 heading south, I and all of the other prisoners on the bus noticed a very foul smell in the air. I looked around to see what was causing it but all I saw was emptiness. It lasted for about 5 minutes until the culprit finally emerged. I swear there were 100,000 cows on that factory farm. They eat and shit about 4 times as much as humans yet there's no sewer system. All were awaiting there turn to be slaughtered. Later someone told me they call this place Cowshwitz.

Frank, "Cowshwitz" is actually the famous Harris Ranch Feedlot. That's one of the places I used to go. It's considered the "greenest" and most scientific feedlot in the world. Cattle from there are all natural and hormone free. The way that works is that they are fed massive doses of hormones when they are first brought to the lot. As they fatten up, they are tapered off the hormones until, by the time they are ready for slaughter they have gained a huge amount of weight, but the hormones are out of their system. All of the shit from the cattle is captured and handled in a safe and hygienic manner.

As you mentioned, the stench from the place is unbelievable. The flies are just as bad. Feedlot workers and their kids are housed right on the lot. Inside the feedlot, surrounded by mountains of cowshit and clouds of flies, there are tidy little central valley tract homes with those plastic play sets out in the yard. Back in the eighties, when I was going there often, "cowboys" at the ranch were paid a thousand dollars a month, a free house and all of the meat they wanted. The meat came from culled animals that were injured or in some other way unfit for market. Country living.

Drink my Friday ration of beer, sleep, read about people eating downed cow sandwiches - I think I have to heave.

I do not know how folks differentiate between the yummy, almost flyless, Canadian seal harvest and the 365 day a year domestic animal concentration camp harvest when they make their value judgments about what gristle they want to chew on.

My brother had a pig. Pig's name was Hank. We used to watch Hank eat the shit that came out of my brother's dog's ass before the shit was even halfway out of the dog's ass. That pig had a good life, a punk rocker's life: short but free.

The thing that differtiates us from Hank is that when we eat shit, like the shit they ship out of big animal farms, we can tell each other how good it tastes.

...desire is nothing but opinion maturing for action...

About Beer

Guiding (Bertuzzi) principle - The most desirable condition of the human species is to get together at the hockey rink and have a few beers.
The injustice and violence of men in a hockey rink having a few beers produced the demand for ushers.
Ushers, as they were forced upon men having a few beers at the rink became common place, a creature of the paying hockey fan's ignorance and mistake.
Ushers were intended to suppress injustice, but they offered new occasions and temptations for the commission of it.
By concentrating the force of the community, it gives occasion to wild projects of calamity, to oppression, despotism, war and conquest - sometimes beer sales are even cut off during the third period.
By perpetuating and aggravating the inability to get drunk in public ushers foster men's injurious passions, and excites men to the practice of butt ending and high sticking, breaking necks and in some areas to throw dead seafood onto the ice.
Ushers were intended to suppress injustice, but their effect has been to embody and perpetuate it.